Home Sci-tech

Fun run hosted in Cape Town to highlight importance of air quality

3 December 2022, 10:00 AM |

Lynne Arendse | @SABCNews

Steam rises at sunrise from the Lethabo Power Station, a coal-fired power station owned by state power utility ESKOM near Sasolburg, South Africa, March 2, 2016.

Image: Reuters

Steam rises at sunrise from the Lethabo Power Station, a coal-fired power station owned by state power utility ESKOM near Sasolburg, South Africa, March 2, 2016.

The Department of Science and Innovation is hosting a fun run in Sea Point and Khayelitsha in Cape Town to highlight the importance of monitoring urban air quality.

Participants in the Cityzens 4 Clean Air run are equipped with sensors to test the air quality on their route.

The department’s Deputy Director of Africa Bilateral Cooperation, Modikoe Patjane, says the data will be analysed and the findings will be shared at the World Science Forum in Cape Town next week.

“They will test the air quality in Khayelitsha, they will test the air quality in Sea Point in the route that they are taking. The idea is evidence-based policy-making involving young people in data collection and evidence of science,” says Patjane.

Pollution killing nine million people a year, Africa hardest hit – Study

Worsening outdoor air pollution and toxic lead poisoning have kept global deaths from environmental contamination at an estimated nine million per year since 2015 – countering modest progress made in tackling pollution elsewhere, a team of scientists reported Tuesday.

Air pollution from industry processes along with urbanization drove a 7% increase in pollution-related deaths from 2015 to 2019, according to the scientists’ analysis of data on global mortality and pollution levels.

“We’re sitting in the stew pot and slowly burning,” said Richard Fuller, a study co-author and head of the global nonprofit Pure Earth. But unlike climate change, malaria, or HIV, “we haven’t given (environmental pollution) much focus.”

An earlier version of the work published in 2017 also estimated the death toll from pollution at roughly nine million per year — or about one of every six deaths worldwide — and the cost to the global economy at up to $4.6 trillion per year.

That puts pollution on par with smoking in terms of global deaths. COVID-19, by comparison, has killed about 6.7 million people globally since the pandemic began.

For their most recent study, published in the online journal Lancet Planetary Health, the authors analyzed 2019 data from the Global Burden of Disease, an ongoing study by the University of Washington that assesses overall pollution exposure and calculates mortality risk.

The new analysis looks more specifically at the causes of pollution – separating traditional contaminants such as indoor smoke or sewage from more modern pollutants, like industrial air pollution and toxic chemicals.

Here are some of the key takeaways:

WATER AND INDOOR AIR

Deaths from traditional pollutants are declining globally. But they remain a major problem in Africa and some other developing countries.

Tainted water and soil and dirty indoor air put Chad, the Central African Republic and Niger as the three countries with the most pollution-related deaths, according to data adjusted for population.

State programmes to cut indoor air pollution and improvements in sanitation have helped to curb death tolls in some places.

In Ethiopia and Nigeria, these efforts brought related deaths to drop by two-thirds between 2000 and 2019.

Meanwhile, the Indian government in 2016 began offering to replace wood-burning stoves with gas stove connections.

MODERN POLLUTANTS

Deaths caused by exposure to modern pollutants such as heavy metals, agrochemicals and fossil fuel emissions are “just skyrocketing”, rising 66% since 2000, said co-author Rachael Kupka, executive director of the New York-based Global Alliance on Health and Pollution.

When it comes to outdoor air pollution, some major capital cities have seen some success, including in Bangkok, China, and Mexico City, the authors said. But in smaller cities, pollution levels continue to climb.

HIGHEST POLLUTION-RELATED DEATHS

The study offered a list of the 10 countries most affected by pollution-related deaths, based on their findings on mortality adjusted for population.

1. Chad; 2. Central African Republic; 3. Niger; 4. Solomon Islands; 5. Somalia; 6. South Africa; 7. North Korea; 8. Lesotho; 9. Bulgaria; 10. Burkina Faso.

Additional reporting: Reuters